The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that the Himalayan glaciers are melting, with dire long-term consequences for water in the north. The newspaper headlines display the latest in the long running, still ongoing, Karnataka-Tamil Nadu dispute over the Cauvery. And the 40-plus degree heat in Delhi sends everyone running to the tanker trucks, handpumps, taps, or other water source.
India has three interlinked sets of water woes: scarcity, institutional ambiguity, and, effectively, lack of infrastructure to distribute and recycle water. In a three part series, we intend to discuss the challenges, opportunities and policy priorities for addressing these issues.
Scarcity is simply described. India has a fifth of the world?s population and one twenty-fifth of its water resources. Per-capita water supply is already limited, and expected to shrink by as much as 38% by 2050. The scarcity leaves little margin for error in managing India?s groundwater resources and increasingly erratic monsoons. Even in the best of times, groundwater is where it is, and rainfall is highly cyclical. Half the rainfall falls in just 15 days, and more than nine-tenths of river flows occur in just one-third of the year.
Which brings us to the institutional ambiguity. India has no clear regime for inter-state, inter-town, or inter-neighbour disputes over water. The Inter-State Water Disputes Act of 1956 charts a de jure dispute authority and protocol; de facto disputes drag on in a variety of fora. Villages and cities wrangle over water in the market and political arenas: pumping and trucking ground water is a flourishing business, while more formal arrangements evolve with the political winds. Neighbours compete for the same aquifer?water does not stay put under one person?s land.
The result: an overwhelming incentive to appropriate much of this essentially non-renewable resource before others do. Much of the groundwater goes to irrigate more than half of India?s agricultural land. But in other cases, the more lucrative bet is to sell it to those desperate for drinking water. Private water supply?the de facto norm as discussed below?is actually one of the few places where ?ownership? does seem to be clear. Those without taps suffer the most; water from tankers can cost almost twice as much as the city water supply, not to mention the hours spent waiting in line for access.
Electricity often gets the prize for India?s ?worst infrastructure? but water and sanitation is clearly not far behind.
Theoretical access to water looks fine. Almost 83% of rural households had access to improved water sources in 2004, well above the low income (and middle income) country averages, and comparable to much-richer Mexico. With 95% of urban households having access to improved water sources, India is above the middle income country average (94%) and even slightly ahead of China, in which urban access to improved water sources fell from 99% to 93% from 1990 to 2004.
But the ?improved source? can mean a single handpump per village. And water purity varies widely. The World Health Organization estimates that diarrhoeal diseases, frequently associated with contaminated water, account for 5% of India?s disease burden, and 11% of its communicable disease burden.
Access to improved water sources does not necessarily also mean access to water. A recent World Bank paper reported that India?s capital city has an average of four hours of supply a day, Mumbai has five hours a day, and Bangalore has 2.5 hours of water a day (down from 20 hours a day in the early 1980s). Chennai residents have public water for 1.5 hours a day on average, compared to 10 -15 hours in the early 1980s. Jakarta, Dakar, Kuala Lumpur, Durban and Penang have 24 hour water supply. Colombo has 22 hours a day on average.
Waste water is not removed, let alone recycled. India?s cities compare to those in Benin, Zambia and Mali in terms of urban households? access to improved sanitation: 59% for the four countries. The quality of the ?improved sanitation? also varies: the Indian Census of 2001 found that 43% of urban households? waste water drained through open channels. India?s closest comparators for rural access to improved sanitation (at 22% of households in 2004) are Bolivia, Kiribati and Guinea-Bissau. As in urban areas, many of the improved systems include open drainage and/or pit latrines: 2001 census data records just 3.9% of households as having closed drainage for waste water.
Businesses are about the only group that review India?s water infrastructure positively: firms covered in the 2006 World Bank-CII Investment Climate Survey reported just 1.43 days of inadequate water supply per year, relatively short outages (6.75 hours on average), and just over 2.5% of sales were lost to water shortages (compared to 6.6% for electricity outages). This is probably because they do not depend on public infrastructure: only 22.7% of respondents? water came from public sources, one of the lowest percentages in the world. The survey did not ask about sanitation.
India?s three water woes are usually discussed in separate breaths, as demonstrations of the need for conservation, property rights, dispute resolution, public-private partnerships, more efficient public investment, and so on. The solution has to be holistic: each matter affects the incentives and ability to solve the others. We will continue the discussion in the next article.
